Startups: Illustrate Your Company History with Timeglider

March 27, 2012

5:00 pm

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For startups, your About page can be the trigger for journalists contacting you or customers feeling engaged and inspired by your mission. Instead of a boring block of text, try building a timeline with Timeglider.

A startup itself, Timeglider emerged when two cofounders were struck with a similar idea: Michael Richardson was seeking a history of articles published by the New York Times, and Will Reilly just wanted to follow the updates from a football game.

Now, years after Timeglider was founded in 2008, anyone can create an interactive timeline with images and zoom. Compared to alternatives Tiki-Toki and TimeRime, Timeglider tries to make creating easy: it follows the Google Maps model, and you can double click to create events or drag to move across time. The timelines are quite text-heavy at the moment – because of the technical challenges around handling images – but Richardson assures me that future versions will incorporate images better.

Used by Wired, NASA, and thousands of teachers, Timeglider can also appeal to genealogists and historians, lawyers or project managers, and startups who want to shake up their About page. According to Richardson:

“We’ve used Timeglider internally for planning and recording our own milestones, including just fun moments in our own history. It’s useful to have a view on history that shows gaps, clusters of activity, and future plans.”

You can also think up more oddball uses, like a schedule:

“A casino in New Mexico was going through a huge IT transition, so they showed all the timings of servers, cash registers, camera systems, etc. changing over as operating systems were being updated, hardware being swapped,” explains Richardson, who’s also a furniture maker and fiction writer.

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Kira M. Newman is a Tech Cocktail writer interested in the harsh reality of entrepreneurship, work-life balance, and psychology. She is the founder of The Year of Happy and has been traveling around the world interviewing entrepreneurs in Asia, Europe, and North America since 2011. Follow her @kiramnewman or contact [email protected]